Jill laughed.
“We can’t all be workers, I suppose,” she said, “yet I fancy if I had been given my choice I should have chosen that kind of independence. Work is necessary to me.”
“From a selfish point of view I am glad that it is; otherwise you wouldn’t paint portraits.”
“What makes you fancy that?” she asked.
“No one who paints as you do would undertake portraits if they could avoid it. I know a man who has always one canvas at least in the academy, but he can’t afford to paint pictures now; they don’t sell; so he does portraits.”
Jill sighed.
“I am sorry for that man,” she said, “his life must be a disappointment. The people who want to be painted are generally so impossible.”
“My dear girl,” remonstrated St. John, “considering the circumstances that is one of the things better left unsaid.”
“I am speaking from the artistic sense,” she replied; “besides I said ‘generally.’”
“I quite understand,” interposed Markham laughing, “and entirely agree with you. But that won’t interfere with the sitting on Tuesday, eh?”